In the context of the UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, a wide field of NGOs is active in between governments and communities to translate concepts, facilitate and support safeguarding programs, advocate bearers’ perspectives and interests, etc. In doing so, they often turn out to be key actors for successful heritage processes engaging communities.

In India, a land of faith, there are numerous occasions and venues where fear, desire, spirits, and rituals converge, leaving logic to take a back seat.

he upheaval and extinction faced by traditional culture is a core issue in today’s world. It has brought us to the realization that we are living in an important transition period where the future of humanity will be determined. In particular, the advent of digital platforms has provided a communication channel to link people together; the importance of these platforms seems poised to become much greater. In this era, in which means of communication are facing remarkable qualitative changes, oral tradition is under considerable threat. In past eras where humankind created languages and memories to resolve all kinds of issues and share information, speech was a way to achieve totality. Through speech, people delivered their thoughts and opinions, created new things, and embraced differences to become one. As such, spoken language became an absolute means and solution to maximize the immense capacity of humankind. People discovered interests and meanings through conversations; they combined work and enjoyment by singing; they wore masks and gave movement-based performances accompanied by amusing anecdotes. By reciting and dedicating bonpuri, a ritual song to pray to deities and receive oracles, their creations became content passed down through oral culture.

When it comes to the preservation of intangible cultural heritage (ICH), threats that lead to the loss of the viability of one or another element of ICH are latently implied. From a social anthropological point of view, this is a question of the interaction between tradition and innovation: do new technologies always negatively affect traditional art? How does modern everyday life affect the sustainability of a traditional view of the world that underlies the identity of each element of ICH?\n

Nowadays, the three-dimensional (3D) data acquisition and modeling technology, which has been evolving from the late 1900s to recent years, is a useful geometric documentation tool for cultural heritage and accumulating numerous cultural heritage digital data. In the Republic of Korea, attempts have been made to build 3D cultural heritage data by several companies since the introduction of 3D scanners in the late 1990s. From the early 2000s, the Cultural Heritage Administration (CHA) in Korea also began to lead the project to record cultural heritage using digital technology, including 3D scanning. Although 3D scanning has been getting essential to every documentary project ordered by government agencies, local governments, and cultural heritage agencies, the process and the results were not strictly standardized. To overcome the problematic issues caused by this, the CHA decided to publish a guideline for records of cultural heritage using 3D scanning. The first version was published in 2015 and a revised version in 2018. In this paper, the issues discussed in the development phase of the guidelines are introduced, and lessons learned are given. Revision of the guidelines for 3D scanning of cultural heritage Prior to the production of guidelines for three-dimensional scanning, the Cultural Heritage Administration had produced standardization and production guidelines for digitalization in metric survey projects. “Guideline for building standardized data in the cultural heritage documentation projects” published 2000 includes standardization guidelines for data submitted, such as naming convention, the hierarchy of the files, data backup, quality management, and outcome management. “Guideline for the precise metric survey of historical architectures” includes essential issues for the metric survey mainly for historic buildings with 3D scanning and GPS technology.

Efforts for the sustainable development of human cultures, which is defined by UNESCO as its most important goal, have already affected our lives in many ways. Among others, the inheritance and development of ICH are considered unique to humanity and the quintessence of human life. Education plays a vital role in the process of cultural inheritance and development. In particular, the experiences and education we receive during elementary school as young members of a future generation have a critical and meaningful influence on our lives. The significance of ICH education for the sustainable development of humanity is evidently underlined in UNESCO’s 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage and its Operational Directives.

"Papua New Guinea’s population is made up of at least 875 cultural groups. Given this high degree of cultural diversity, Papua New Guinea is rich in many cultural forms. Unlike other parts of the world where there are monuments and other structures that form the main body of cultural heritage, Papua New Guinea has mostly intangible cultural heritage. \n Recognising the important value of intangible cultural heritage to its people, the government of Papua New Guinea is interested in properly managing and maintaining its heritage. Over the last hundred years, there have been a number of instruments implemented for managing and maintaining culture, but until only recently, there had been nothing in place specifically for safeguarding intangible cultural heritage. What is in place so far in this regard has been developed in only the last four years. \nBackground \nCulturally, Papua New Guinea shares many traits with other groups in the Pacific and South-East Asian region due to the historical connections it has with these two parts of the world. In itself, Papua New Guinea’s cultural history dates back to about 30,000 years, the earliest dating of human presence in the country. \nWhile most of the country is currently populated by non-Austronesians, who are believed to have arrived later in history, some parts of the country are inhabited by Austronesians, who were the earlier inhabitants of the region. The culture of Papua New Guinea is then seen in terms of the two main divides and they forms part of the basis for the work in the country’s cultural sector. \nThe culture service in Papua New Guinea has been in place since the British and German colonial eras, dating back to the early 1900s. This early legislation was mainly concerned with the protection of indigenous cultures forms of primitive art, which was lucrative for the colonists. These protective instruments were mainly "

Central Asia is a region that has served as the centre of social and economic, in particular cultural interrelations of East and West. The nations of this region have a rich cultural heritage and ancient traditions like any nation in the world. The nations of Central Asia - Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Tajikistan – make up a unified cultural space, defined by great grassland steppes and famous mountains, nomadic culture and common history, relics and traditions. Throughout this region we find petroglyphs, keregsur, steles, ruins and other monuments attesting to the mingling of peoples in the Central Asian steppe since prehistory. The territory of our own nation, Mongolia, has indeed been the centre several nomadic empires at various stages in history, established by different peoples of Central Asia sharing a similar cultural origin – Hunnu, Khitan, Turks, Uighurs, Kyrgyz and Mongols.

The University of Santo Tomas-Graduate School Center for Conservation of Cultural Property and the Environment in the Tropics (USTGS-CCCPET) was established in 2003 primarily to advance research and advocacy on heritage conservation and sustainable development. At a time when heritage was at risk all over the world, pressured by globalization, climate change, migration, tourism, and terrorism, the search for memory and identity became more pronounced and more assertive.

The tug-of-war is one of the most well-known intangible cultural heritage elements that represent the Republic of Korea. Tug-of-war games were widely enjoyed by people across the country before the 1930s and 1940s. During the 1960s, the tug-of-war came under the protection of the Cultural Heritage Conservation Policy and has been appointed and is being managed by local and national governments. Locally, eight tug-of-war traditions have been inscribed on the national inventory list. Moreover, compared to other ICH element studies, of the element has been significantly researched.\n\nTug-of-war is a cultural heritage element of many East Asian nations, and these nations are preparing to nominate the element to the UNESCO Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. In this context, the goal of this paper is to discover universal traits in tug-of-war traditions in East Asia. However, besides the Republic of Korea and Japan, there is insufficient research on tug-of-war traditions in the region, which limits the scope of this presentation. In case of China, despite the existence of various records on tug-of-war in literature, the tradition as it exists in China today seems to be more of a sports match than a ritual event. I would also like to mention that this paper is a draft based on document records, the Internet, and the academic symposium hosted by Gijisi Tug-of-War Conservation Institute.

Vernacular martial arts (VMA) occupy a special niche within the diverse phenomena classified as martial arts. Cross-culturally, “Martial arts can be defined as systematic bodies of knowledge, belief, and practice that are associated with methods of attack and defense against … adversaries” (Green and Svinth, 2010, p. 331). On close examination, we learn that the behaviors we attempt to gather under this umbrella term are quite diverse, ranging from life-and-death struggles through rule-governed sporting contests to expressive forms, from globalized combat sports to localized martial culture. The systems that fall on the latter end of this spectrum I have applied the VMA label to, and among the various martial expressions these are the ones that most clearly qualify as intangible cultural heritage (ICH). The following distinctions are useful for the current discussion.

This publication contains papers from the 2021 World Intangible Cultural Heritage Forum held online for three days, from September 29 to October 1, 2021. The event was hosted by the National Intangible Heritage Center and organized by ICHCAP.\n\nThe forum was held under the theme of “Rediscovering Intangible Cultural Heritage in the Era of Convergence and Creativity” to re-examine the creative value of intangible cultural heritage and present the possibilities by examining examples of innovation and value creation through intangible cultural heritage.